Campus Safety and Security, pt. 2

UVa events – Marge Sidebottom and Virginia Evans (UVA)

How do we determine where high risk areas are on any given day, and are they located in the right places for the controversy that might accompany any given guest speaker? Beginning to populate a system to record those. Look at controversial speakers, as well as protests. The lone wolf terrorist is the other common concern – may find information that helps to plan better. Expect threat assessment team to look at issues within their own areas, and mitigate those – if they can’t then it escalates to the threat assessment team, which meets weekly.

Aug 11 & 12 – protest by white supremacists and neo-nazis. There were lots of advanced preparations by the city and the campus. This culminated a series of events over the previous months in different parks. Several hundred showed up at UVa on Friday night with lit torches and surrounded a small number of students. Violence broke out, but police dispersed activity. By late morning Saturday there were thousands in a small area of downtown Charlottesville, including heavily armed alt-right protesters. Then the car ramming event happened, and then the police helicopter crashed.

The University had begun planning three week prior to the event. Had 2 meetings a week of the emergency incident management team, and the President held daily meetings. There is a city/county/university EOC structure. The city decided to have their EOC in a different location, which compromised communications. University teams went on 12 hour shifts beginning Friday morning.

When protesters moved on campus, the events developed very rapidly. It became clear that they were not following the plan they had committed to.

Having the EOC stood up was very useful. Had the University’s emergency management team in a separate room, so they could be briefed regularly. At 11:50 on Saturday, cancelled activities on campus starting at noon to not have venues that presented opportunities for confrontations. Worked carefully with a long-planned wedding at the chapel, but it did take place. They were unaware of admissions tours that were going on – once they found out, rallied faculty to accompany student guides and families, and then ended tours early.

Taking care of the needs for mental health attention for participants is important.

John DiFava (MIT Chief of Police)

MIT culture – it can’t happen here, and it won’t happen here. Also the culture of the city of Cambridge is very open and loose. Campus police used to be focused on friendly service and would call in external agencies when in need. Times have changed – policing on campus is just as complex and demanding as any other type of policing. Universities are no longer isolated.

Columbine massacre had a tremendous impact – Officers followed procedure to establish perimeter and wait for tactical units to arrive. Now they are taught to make entry.

9/11 attacks had a significant impact on policing. MIT police lost all of their officers to other jurisdictions immediately. Interagency cooperation was was inadequate. Created a cascading effect – the cavalry was out of town, so had to rely on local resources.

New reality – had to be able to function wihtout assistance; aid would not arrive as quickly and in the quantity it once did.

Steps taken to improve capability and performance – a comprehensive approach: Recruitment process, promotional system, supervision, training improvements – do in-service training with Cambridge Police and Harvard; firearms requalification three times a year (twice during the day, once in low light); specialized training for every officer; active shooter training (with Cambridge PD, Harvard, and MSP).

Work with Institute entities – Emergency management reports to Police.

Certain emergency phases – Pre-incident planning, inbound emergency notification, emergency assessment, emergency alert operation, emergency notification delivery. The value to the community of notifications is based on total time of all phases.

Inbound emergency notification: Making it simple, do it like they do it every day (students choose their cell phones over using the emergency blue phones); Get as much information as possible: video, audio (phone), text; Enable people to contact us in the ways they know — social media, apps, etc; coverage and capacity; knowing where the person is.

Emergency Assessment: Issues include confirmation, authorization, timeliness. If you can get a message out in 8-10 minutes of an incident, you’re doing well.

Emergency alert operation: additional modes and desired content will delay message creation; decisions and effort slow the operator; Hick’s Law: the time it takes for a person to make a decision as a result of the possible choices they have: increasing the number of choices will increase the decision time logarithmically.

Emergency notification delivery: Speed is the priority. Issues: Get people to sign up for the right service(s) – there is not a single mode; infrastructure coverage. They can get delivery to every email inbox in Ann Arbor (~105k) in about 7 minutes, but email is not the only mode. They have apps with push notifications – time of delivery is right around 10 seconds. The future is focused messages to appropriate recipients, by topic, or location, by individual choice.

VTAlerts – designed with redundancy. Goal is that every member of the community will be notified by at least one channel. Originally built in-house, but now a complex hybrid environment with some local and some vendor channels in the cloud.

New beginning – recognition of prioritized support for public safety. Group within IT expanded to include more channels: VT Alerts, blue light telephones, next generation 911, security camera system. Having one group responsible gives one point of contact in IT for public safety officials. Having dedicated staff allows for much better response times. They’ve removed dependencies on single individuals.

Communication – notification and collaboration – use the ticketing system.

Sustainable support – important to be proactive rather than reactive in public safety. New monitoring capabilities, improved redundancy, long term planning, channel development.

ENS philosophy: What is happening, where is it happening, what do we want you to do about it? They have 21 templates.

Current Challenges: How do we institutionalize the process to avoid backsliding when people change? What are appropriate success metrics for system evaluation? What are the cyber-security concerns of the components and system as a whole?

Evolving Radio Technologies – Glenn Rodrigues, UC Boulder

LMR (land mobile radio) project at CU Boulder. Business problem: lack of ability to communicate between Public Safety officials and leadership during planned events and unplanned incidents; Officers don’t feel safe doing their job without proper communications. Plan of action: Complete LMR audit for University; short term fixes; long term fixes.

Audit: requirements – contractor had to be vendor neutral; LMR customer interview and use case mapping; technical recommendations backed with data. Output: Clients – CUPD + 9 other business units. Biggest problem was coverage inside buildings (and system overloads). Tech assessment: most equipment was over 10 years old and malfunctioning, no real resource dedicated to monitor and engage with customers, most portable radios were not optimal. Business assessment: lack of policy enforcement (internal and external); lack of visibility of individual unit needs; lack of engagement with business partners. Plans: stabilize current LMR system under limited budget in 3 months by replacing high risk or failed equipment, leverage existing University assets (monitoring, backup power). Longer term: want to patch LMR into the campus fiber backbone. RFI in process.

John Board – Duke

Had the opportunity to green field a managed, networked, camera system. Lawyers were concerned about lack of standardization and maintenance of existing cameras. Started with parking decks. Goal was evidentiary, not live surveillance. Budgeted cost actually included maintenance, ongoing verification and network and storage costs. All cameras installed and operationally verified by OIT. Cisco VSOM, decent API. 1024 cameras in operation now.

The institution is zealous about privacy. They have a policy about access to live and stored images; have a retention policy; there’s a committee that decides where cameras go (you can’t put up cameras up outside the system). Challenge around need vs demand.

Wanting to do automated image analysis to verify that cameras are working, e.g. deviation of sample image vs reference image. EE faculty proposed writing an algorithm for this. After some experimentation came to an algorithm that filters ~80% of good cameras, while reliably identifying 100% of bad cameras. By using 3-day averages, safely filters 95% of good cameras – declaring victory!

Va Tech – Crowd Monitoring and Management on Game Day – Major Mac Babb

Stadium holds 66k people. Originally built in 1965. Hokie Village across the street, 20 parking lots, most of which are licensed for alcohol.

Crisis communications toolkit – UW Alert Blog (wordpress.com) — can send messages to banners on the UW home page and to the hot-line telephone. UW Alert (e2campus) sends text and email messages. UW Alert facebook and twitter channels. There’s an outdoor alert system (talkaphone) and an indoor alert system (PA capabilities on fire alarm system (problem is they have to send to all buildings at once)). Plan to use Red Cross Safe & Well system to account for people.

97% of time crisis communication team is activated by campus police — 20 some people, calling into a conference bridge. Initiator briefs team, primarily incident commander who decides what action to take. Person who initiates the call should be ready to send out the first message. Decide which tool(s) to use to send alert, and then team stays on the bridge after the message is sent.